How did the global and regional circulation of resources, techniques, and technologies transform local ecologies, practices, and livelihoods? Located between the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean, the Ryukyu Kingdom (?-1879; modern-day Okinawa, Japan) was a vital entrepôt in the early modern world, facilitating the movement of goods and people between northeast Asia and southeast Asia. This talk situates craft practices and material knowledge at the center of Ryukyu history to explore the historical entanglements of materials, bodies, and skills in the making and remaking of culture.

BuYun Chen is Associate Professor of Asian history at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China (University of Washington Press, 2019). Her current research explores the relationship between craft production, statecraft practices, and ecological change in the independent Ryukyu Kingdom (modern-day Okinawa, Japan) from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

Date | Time
November 3, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, November 3rd; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Fall 2021 series, please fill out this form.

This talk follows the translation history of the Anglo-Jewish author Grace Aguilar’s 1850 novel The Vale of Cedars from Victorian England to Mainz, Warsaw, Vilna, Calcutta, and Tunis. A case study for my broader project on “Global Haskalah,” it brings together Sephardic studies, world literature and translation studies, transnational literary history, and Jewish literary studies. Through this project, I argue for two interventions: a rethinking of the nation-centered model of world literature, and a revision of the Eurocentric narrative of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). The novel’s history begins with a work of minor literature by a Sephardic Englishwoman about a quintessential minority topic: crypto-Jews in the Spanish Inquisition. Originally intended as a refutation of English conversionists, by the end of the century the novel had appeared in multiple free translations into Hebrew, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic, refashioned to instill their readers with pride in historical Jewish nobility and martyrdom. In addition to mapping the book’s journey and elucidating the cultural markers of its myriad translations, the talk will foreground the Calcutta Judeo-Arabic edition and its social-historical context. This presentation is co-sponsored by The Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) at UCSC.

Lital Levy is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she teaches comparative literature and theory, Hebrew literature, Arabic literature, and Jewish studies. Her work integrates literary and cultural studies with intellectual history and religious thought. She is the author of Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton University Press, 2014), which won the MLA Prize for a First Book and awards from the AAJR and AJS. She is currently completing The Jewish Nahda, an intellectual history of Arab Jews and modernity.

Date | Time
November 10, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, November 17th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Fall 2021 series, please fill out this form.

Taking recent discussions of “Copernican Forecasting” as a point of departure, this talk will look to historical and probabilistic arguments representing science in terms of ongoing demonstrations of the increasingly marginal position of humanity. A sketch of some of the genealogies of these arguments and their representations suggest how ill-fitting they might be when set against varying historical conceptions of centrality, probability, and forecasting.

Nasser Zakariya is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His doctorate is in history of science, with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. His research interests concern science and narrative, as well as varied topics in the history and philosophy of science. He has taught and held research fellowships at a number of institutions, including the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and New York University Tandon School of Engineering (formerly Polytechnic Institute of NYU).

Date | Time
November 17, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, November 17th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Fall 2021 series, please fill out this form.

What does it mean to be driven crazy? By a parent, a professor, a president, perhaps even the internet itself? In 1959 the psychoanalyst Harold Searles published a paper in The British Journal of Medical Psychology, “The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy: An Element in the Aetiology and Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia.” “My clinical experience,” he wrote, “has indicated that the individual becomes schizophrenic partly by reason of a long-continued effort, a largely or wholly unconscious effort, on the part of some person or persons highly important in his upbringing, to drive him crazy.” This talk will consider Searles’s thesis and its implications for our understanding of mental life. It will argue that, while it may not be a very good explanation for schizophrenia, it nevertheless offers us new opportunities to think about our relations to media, culture, and one another.

Ben Kafka is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is also a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012) and co-editor, with Francesco Pellizzi and Stefanos Geroulanos, of The Problem of the Fetish: William Pietz’s Lost Manuscript (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is currently working on a book about gaslighting, folies-à-deux, double binds, Catch-22s, and other forms of induced insanity.

Date | Time
April 7, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
This colloquium is co-sponsored by the History Department.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 7th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.

This presentation will examine the inherent complexities in the academic study and public representation of American Indian culture(s), and how the categorization and defining of Native American objects aids in the construction of American Indian identity.

Rebecca Hernandez is currently the Director of the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz, where she is focused on the retention of Native students and developing programs that promote a better understanding of American Indian culture(s) and lifeways at UCSC. She has worked in university administration for 15 years and taught courses in universities and community colleges. Her PhD is in American Studies with a concentration in Native American Studies and Visual Culture. She also holds an MFA in Exhibition Design and Museum Studies.

Date | Time
April 14, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 14th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.

Left-Standing is a performance of written and video poems. The video does not illustrate the writing; rather, the two media become an interconnected poetics. Together, these forms of poetry engage visual, aural, and affective dimensions of ordinary human encounters with the nonhuman world. The overall scenario presents encounters both with animals who wander a suburban neighborhood after a woods has been razed and developed, and with the trees, grasses, waters, and crops in the leftover woods and its surrounding farmlands. Lepselter’s presentation evokes a world at a moment of ecological, social, and epistemological precarity and continuity.

Susan Lepselter is Associate Professor of American Studies, and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Folklore, at Indiana University Bloomington. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to narrative and poetics in the United States, and has published work on UFO stories, conspiracy theories, dream narratives, and hoarding shows. She is currently completing a multimedia book of poetry supported by a New Frontiers award from Indiana University. Her book The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity and UFOs in the American Uncanny (University of Michigan Press, 2016) won the 2017 Society for Cultural Anthropology Bateson Prize.

Date | Time
April 21, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 21st; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.

This talk/participatory workshop will draw from the methods and theoretical orientation of two of Cox’s current projects. The first, Cosmic Cartographies, explores how people define and actualize strategies for Black liberation and is inspired by the ways in which a group of multigeneration Black women activists articulate their physical and psychic relationship to space in Cincinnati. The second, BodyStorm, tracks the social choreography, mobilities, gestures, ways of experiencing the body, and what we might even call dance techniques that are emerging in this time of intensified uncertainty and precarity, as a response to the present and, potentially, as a way of practicing for the future. Cox’s presentation and audience engagement will employ the embodied knowledge and relational techniques developed within and across both projects to explore our own capacities to access new ways of feeling, comprehending, and being in the world.

Aimee Meredith Cox is an anthropologist, writer, movement artist, and critical ethnographer. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Anthropology and African American Studies departments at Yale University. Aimee’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America and a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing. She is the editor of the volume Gender: Space (MacMillan, 2018). Aimee is also a dancer and choreographer. She performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn. Aimee is currently working on two book projects based on ethnographic research among Black communities in Cincinnati, Ohio; Jackson, Mississippi; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn. This overall project is called “Living Past Slow Death.”

Date | Time
April 28, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
This colloquium is co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program. 

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 28th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.

A family of would-be migrants reenacts a swarm hunt at their former apiary in northeastern Bosnia. Their folk spells were well-attuned to the sorts of crises that tatter old human-apian ties, except the latest: extreme weather and emigration. Meanwhile, one tepid February, shepherds reflect on gratitude as their sheep graze by the growing coal-power plant. “The End is not yet,” they say. These are snapshots of what Jasarevic calls the quiets of disaster. Sharing a rough cut of a story from an ethnographic film, Jasarevic’s presentation concerns disaster ecology, Islamic eschatology, and ethnography as a homesteading craft.

Larisa Jasarevic is an independent scholar and a 2021 Wenner-Gren Fejos Fellow. An anthropologist, she has research interests in bodies and health, nature, and eschatology. A beekeeper and a homesteader, she is developing dread about multispecies climate futures. Her second book, Beekeeping in the End Times (IUP), is in preparation. She taught for a decade at the University of Chicago. 

Date | Time
May 5, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 5th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.

Savcı will speak about her book Queer in Translation, which draws on the case of Turkey’s 16 years of AKP governance to intervene in Queer Studies’ separate — indeed, diagonically opposed — approaches to neoliberalism and to Islam. She theorizes “neoliberal Islam” as a unique regime that brings together economic and religious moralities to deploy marginality onto ever-expanding populations instead of concentrating it in the lower echelons of society, and she suggests that sexual liberation movements are the most productive places from which to theorize neoliberal Islam, as well as to imagine resistances to it. After an initial presentation, Savcı will then be in conversation with Mayanthi Fernando (UCSC).

Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, Duke University Press) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her second book project, tentatively entitled Failures of Modernization: Polygamy, Islamic Matrimony and Cousin Marriages in the Turkish Republic, turns to those sexual practices that were deemed “uncivilized” and either heavily discouraged or outlawed by the Turkish Republic. Savcı’s work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and Family; Ethnography; Sexualities; Political Power and Social Theory; Theory & Event; Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; GLQ, and in several edited collections.

Date | Time
May 12, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
This colloquium is a joint event with the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA). 

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 12th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.

The farmers protests in India have ignited a widespread resistance movement globally. Focused initially on repressive farm laws enacted by the Indian state, the protests have now expanded to include broader environmental, social, and political concerns impacting the livelihood, independence, and sustenance of working people. What was first seen as an agrarian protest movement has become a rallying call for much-needed debates on dissent, casteism, gender, and economic justice.  

Aarthi Sethi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her primary research interests are in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. She holds degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2017, and before joining Berkeley, she had postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Brown. She has previously published on, and has ongoing research and teaching interests in, urban ethnography and cinematic, media and visual cultures.

Navyug Gill is a scholar of modern South Asia and global history. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University. His research explores questions of agrarian change, labor history, caste politics, postcolonial critique, and global capitalism. His academic and popular writings have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Outlook, Al Jazeera, Law and Political Economy Project, Borderlines, and Trolley Times.

Date | Time
May 19, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
This colloquium is a joint event with the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS). 

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 19th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.